by
Melanie Anne Buddie B.A., University of Guelph, 1994
M.A., University of Northern British Columbia, 1997 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in the Department of History
We accept this dissertation as conforming to the required standard
Dr. Peter A. Baskerville, i^pervisor (I^ a rtm e n t of History)
Dr. Lynne S. Marks, Departmental Member (Department of History)
Dr. Patncia E. Roy, DepartmentalMember (Department of History)
Dr. Annalee Lepp, Outside Member/(De/artment of Women’s Studies)
Dr. Helen Brown, External Examiner (Department of History, Malaspina University- College)
© Melanie Anne Buddie, 2003 University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author.
Supervisor: Dr. Peter A. Baskerville
ABSTRACT
This study examines female self-employment in British Columbia from 1901 to 1971.
Entrepreneurial women comprised a small proportion of the total female labour force but they exhibited differences from the rest of the labour force that deserve attention. The study relies on the Census o f Canada to gain perspective on trends in female self-employment over a broad time period; qualitative sources are also utilized, including Business and Professional Women’s Club records, to illustrate how individual businesswomen reflected patterns of age, marital status, and family observed at a broad level. The role of gender in women’s decisions to run their own enterprises and in their choice of enterprise is also explored. While the research focus is British Columbia, this study is comparative: self-employed women in the province are compared to their counterparts in the rest of Canada, but also to self-employed men, and to other working women, in both regions. Regionally, women in British Columbia had higher rates of self-employment than women in the rest of the country between 1901 and 1971. Self-employed women in both British Columbia and Canada were, like wage-earning women, limited to a narrow range of occupational types, but they were more likely to work in male-dominated occupations. Self- employed women were also older and more likely to be married, widowed or divorced than wage-earning women; in these aspects, they resembled self-employed men. But there were gender differences: whether women worked in female or male-dominated enterprises, they stressed their femininity. The need to take care of their families, particularly if they had lost a spouse through death or desertion, provided additional rationale for women’s presence in the business world. Family, marital status, age, gender and region all played a role in women’s decisions to enter into self-employment between 1901 and 1971.
Examiners:
Dr. Peter A. Baskerville, ^pervisor (Draartment of History)
Dr. Lynne S. Marks, Departmental Member (Department of History)
r. Patricia E. Roy, DepartmentabMember (Department of History)
Dr. Annalee Lepp, Outside Membqr (Department of Women’s Studies)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Table of Contents iii
List of Tables iv
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
Female Self-Employment in British Columbia 1
Chapter One
Women’s Labour Force Participation and Self-Employment: A
Comparison of British Columbia with the Rest of Canada, 1901 to 1971 37
Chapter Two
Careers for Women; The Gendering of the Female Labour Force,
1901-1971, and the Implications for Businesswomen 87
Chapter Three
The Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of British Columbia 152 Chapter Four
You have to think like a man and act like a lady:”
Gender and the Businesswoman 212
Chapter Five
The Business of Family 260
Conclusion
Reflections on the Business of Women 323
Bibliography 332
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1.1; Marital Status of Adult Women; British Columbia and Canada,
1901-1971 46
Table 1.2; Self-Employed Adult Women as a Percentage of all Gainfully
Employed Adult Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901 -1971 52 Table 1.3; Marital Status of Gainfully Employed Adult Women;
British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 53
Table 1.4; Gainfully Employed Adult Women, by Employment Status and
Marital Status; British Columbia, 1901 and 1971 58 Table 1.5; Gainfully Employed Adult Women, by Employment Status and
Marital Status; Canada, 1901 and 1971 60
Table 1.6; Gainfully Employed Married Women as a Percentage of all
Married Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 62 Table 1.7; Self-Employed Married Women as a Percentage of all Married
Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901 and 1971 64 Table 1.8; Gainfully Employed Single Women as a Percentage of all Single
Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 72
Table 1.9; Self-Employed Single Women as a Percentage of all Single
Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901 and 1971 74 Table 1.10; Gainfully Employed Widowed/Divorced Women as a Percentage of
all Widowed/Divorced Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 75 Table 1.11; Self-Employed Widowed/Divorced Women as a Percentage of all
Widowed/Divorced Women; British Columbia and Canada, 1901 and 1971 83 Table 2.1 ; Percentage Distribution of the Female Labour Force by Occupational
Group; British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 93
Table 2.2; Gainfully Employed Adult Women in Selected Occupations; Canada,
1921, 1941 and 1961 101
Table 2.3; Self-Employment Rates (provided as number self-employed and as percent of total employed) Among Gainfully Employed Adult Women in
Table 2.4: Self-Employed Adult Women in Selected Occupations, as a Percentage o f Total Female Self-Employment: British Columbia and Canada,
1901-1971 112
Table 2.5: Male and Female Share(Percentage) of Total Employment in Selected
Occupations: British Columbia and Canada, 1921, 1941, and 1961 113 Table 2.6: Self-Employed Adult Women in Selected Occupations, as a Percentage
o f the Total Female Labour Force: British Columbia and Canada,
1901-1971 146
Table 3.1: Victoria Business and Professional Women’s Club Membership, 1931 160 Table 3.2: Victoria Business and Professional Women’s Club Membership, 1948 160 Table 3.3: Self-Employed Women in the Victoria and Vancouver Business and
Professional Women’s Club, 1921-1963 174
Table 5.1 : Percentage Distribution of Female Workers in Selected Occupations,
According to Age: Canada, 1921 276
Table 5.2: Female Farmers, 1901,1941, and 1971 297
Table 5.3: Marital Status of Male and Female Farmers: British Columbia
and Canada 300
Table 5.4: Female Boarding House Keepers, 1901, 1941, and 1971 312 Table 5.5: Marital Status of Male and Female Boarding House Keepers:
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1 : Adult women’s share of total population, of total labour force,
and of total Self-employed/employer labour force: British Columbia 48 Figure 1.2: Adult women’s share of total population, of total labour force,
and of total Self-employed/employer labour force: Canada 48 Figure 1.3: Gainfully Employed Adult Women as a Percentage of
All Adult Women: British Columbia and Canada 51
Figure 2.1 : Self-Employed Adult Women as a Percentage of all Gainfully
Employed Adult Women: British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 137 Figure 2.2: Self-Employed Adult Men as a Percentage of all Gainfully
Employed Adult Men: British Columbia and Canada, 1901-1971 137 Figure 3.1: The Wedding at the Clubroom, 736 Granville 202 Figure 4.1 : Advertisements for Business Women’s Week: Victoria, 1962 226 Figure 4.2: Vancouver BPW club member Mrs. Bertha Bell and Victoria
BPW club member Mrs. Margaret Harvey 230
Figure 4.3 : Vancouver BPW club member Miss Barbara Macfarlane 232 Figure 5.1: Farm Women in Terrace, British Columbia, c. 1920s 305
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, which aided me in researching this dissertation; thank you also to the Canadian Federation o f University Women and the BC Heritage Trust for their scholarships, which helped me
immeasurably. I would also like to thank the University of Victoria for financial assistance. Many individuals have also provided me with inestimable support. My supervisor, Peter Baskerville, was more helpful and generous than I had any right to expect. He listened to my complaints and tolerated long-winded email messages without a single word of protest. More importantly he knew exactly what kind of assistance I needed and when. I am grateful for his support, friendship and sarcasm (no, really!). Pat Roy, Lynne Marks and Annalee Lepp were generous with their time and comments. When I asked them to read my work in an unreasonably short amount of time, they rose to the challenge. The administrative staff of the history department was always cheerful and encouraging and helped me to navigate the bureaucracy of a doctoral program. I owe a special debt to Karen Hickton who provided friendship as well as administrative aid. Thanks as well to the office staff in the Faculty of Graduate Studies for their help and for their enthusiasm and encouragement upon hearing that I was combining motherhood with graduate studies (which undoubtedly created more paperwork).
Thank you to all of my friends but especially Christie Shaw, Jeffie Roberts, Kristin Semmens, Karen Duder, Barry Laverick, Maggie Quirt, and Nick and Tanya Mitchell; they understood what I was trying to do, listened to me grumble, and provided timely advice (and if I was inconsolable, they fixed me a stiff drink). I want to thank my friend and mentor, Alison Prentice, for her generosity and her confidence in my abilities. Thanks also to the Women’s History Network of British Columbia for sustaining my interest in British Columbia’s history. 1 am grateful to the members of the Canadian Families Project, especially Eric Sager, for including me at CFP meetings and conferences and making me feel part o f a community of historians. Project members also provided helpful advice and suggestions. My thanks also to Marc Trottier and Donna Mandeville for helping me navigate the Canadian Families Project’s database.
I want to thank my brother Chris, who recently completed his doctorate and really did understand what I was going through. He also helped me learn to use Excel spreadsheets. My parents, Liz and Bill, have always encouraged, and never pressured; they gave me freedom to follow my own path and their approach to education was a powerful influence. I also want to thank my parents and my parents-in-law, Bonnie and Ron, for their love and support and for providing childcare when I needed it most. I could not have finished writing the dissertation without their help.
Finally, 1 want to express my love and thanks to my husband Drew and to our daughter, Taren. I could not have completed this “process” without them. Drew was unfailingly patient, loving, and helpful in all ways. He bore the brunt o f my work-related stress with good humour and got me away from my desk when I most needed a break. Taren’s arrival slowed down the pace of work slightly but it was worth it; I would not have had it any other way. My family provided many moments of joy and levity in what might otherwise have been years of relentless toil!
When I began to research self-employed women in British Columbia from 1901 to 1971,1 supposed that most would be single just as other working women very often were, particularly in the first half of the century. Since marriage usually ended gainful employment for women, I hypothesized that some women, willingly or unwillingly, remained single and turned to self-employment to support themselves. For much o f the twentieth century marriage was like an “occupation” for women. It provided financial security in the form of a wage-earning spouse but it was also an occupation in terms of the amount of unpaid work that married women did in the home. If marriage was a form of economic security, then self-employment was an alternative form of security -and as historian Joy Parr has said in the context of wage-earning work, a way to “escape” conjugality. ' I also speculated that female entrepreneurship involved going against the grain o f what British Columbia society felt was “appropriate” feminine behaviour. This, I believed, would bold true for much o f the twentieth century for women who ran their own businesses, “however miniscule or ephemeral.”^
What I discovered about self-employed women - that is, women who worked for themselves, also referred to here as proprietors, entrepreneurs or businesswomen -contradicted my initial assumptions. Being single (never-married) was not a particularly likely condition for self-employed women. They were older, and more likely to be married, widowed or divorced, than wage-earning women. My initial position on businesswomen needed to be re-evaluated.
‘ Joy Parr, “The Skilled Emigrant and Her Kin: Gender, Culture, and Labour Recruitment,” Canadian
Historical Review LXVIII, 4 (December 1987): 530.
^ Wendy Camber, “A Gendered Enterprise: Placing Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History,”
formed a central area o f research. But this led to other questions about the differences between self-employed and wage-earning women, such as whether self-employed women worked in female-dominated trades, as most wage-earning women did. Women’s labour force experiences were diverse and deserve to be examined from different perspectives. Since I was finding differences between self-employed and wage-earning women, the questions were extended: did self-employed women have more in common with self-employed men? How important was gender to women’s entry into self-employment and to the kinds of enterprises they operated?
That entrepreneurship was a “school of manhood” in the period under study here is not in dispute.^ Self-employed women formed a small proportion o f all women workers
and of all business owners in every decade under study and business ownership for much
o f the twentieth century was constructed as a masculine endeavour. Businesswomen, then, chose unconventional paths in life. Just being in the labour force in the early twentieth century was unconventional for women, and those who opened their own businesses were a distinct minority.
At the same time, self-employed women were not rebellious groundbreakers. They struggled to survive and often operated small, home-based businesses in traditionally female occupations. They sometimes ran their own businesses because they could not find other avenues o f work and needed to support family members, and not because they were rebelling against traditional roles as wage earners, or as wives and mothers. Yet, their very existence is a demonstration of a less conventional choice, within the limited set of
^ The expression comes from a 1904 article by Henry Stimson titled “The Small Business as a School of Manhood,” cited in Gamber, "A Gendered Enterprise,” 188-189.
choices available to them. While their accomplishments appear small when weighed against usual standards of success, such as size of business or material wealth, businesswomen achieved a measure of success, however they chose to define it, and independence that did not exist for most wage-earning men or women.
Some, such as newspaperwoman Sara McLagan, achieved a great deal of independence: McLagan founded the Vancouver daily. The World, with her husband in 1888 and as a widow, became sole owner in 1901. She was the first woman to run a daily newspaper in Canada."* McLagan was a prominent entrepreneur with an unusal amount of power, not representative o f the majority of businesswomen in early twentieth-century British Columbia. But even when their operations were marginal there is no reason to assume that self-employed women did not achieve a level o f personal fulfillment from their businesses. Evidence o f economic need does not eliminate choice. Female
entrepreneurs chose entrepreneurship over wage earning and they chose to open particular kinds of businesses. And all self-employed women, regardless o f the size or success of their businesses, gained the distinct advantage of becoming their own (and sometimes someone else’s) boss.
The degree to which businesswomen were “feminine” forms a central part o f this study. Were self-employed women perceived as less feminine in behaviour or appearance than wage-earning women because they operated in a distinctly masculine sphere? As David Burley has argued, notions of masculinity were closely linked to the idea o f the
Maijory Lang and Linda Hale, “Women o f the World and Other Dailies; The Lives and Times of Vancouver Newspaperwomen in the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century,” BC Studies 85 (Spring
entrepreneurs more than they resembled other women in the labour force. Far from working in a female sphere or a women’s work culture, many businesswomen were in a male work culture. Some ran businesses in male-dominated arenas, such as shopkeeping or farming or, in McLagan’s case, publishing. Even women who ran businesses in female- dominated trades, such as sewing or boarding house keeping, were relatively rare in the very fact of their entrepreneurship. They ran their businesses in towns that were not exactly teeming with other businesswomen. Entrepreneurial women were, like
businessmen, more likely to have families, to be in older age brackets, and to be married or once married, than their wage-earning counterparts.
While women in British Columbia were like men in choosing entrepreneurship, they could be feminine and also businesslike, characteristics that would seem antithetical according to literature on entrepreneurship {and on women). A colleague described Sara McLagan as a “most womanly woman and yet one...who can talk politics with men.”^ Businesswomen themselves, and the commentators who described them, reassured the public that even women who worked in male-dominated business worlds were still feminine, at least in mannerism and appearance if not in choice of occupation. Moreover, self-employed women and contemporary observers invoked the language o f family responsibility to justify female entrepreneurship, whether it was in particularly feminized
^ See David Burley, A Particular Condition in Life: Self-Employment and Social Mobility in Mid-
Victorian Brantford, Ontario (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 236.
While Burley makes the connection here between manliness and self-employment, he is certainly not the first or only scholar to do so. Mary Yeager states in her introduction to the three-volume collection Women
in Business that the business world has been made and recorded largely by men. See Mary A. Yeager,
“Introduction,” Yeager, ed.. Women in Business: Volume 1 (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, USA: Elgar, 1999), ix-x.
®Gay Page, cited in Lang and Hale, “Women o f the World and Other Dailies,” 5. Lang and Hale note that while her associates may have wished to emphasize her femininity, “there can be no doubt that McLagan was a strong and independent woman....” See Lang and Hale, “Women o f the World and Other Dailies,” 5.
such as farming.
The final question that needed to be considered was what was different about British Columbia. The province provides an interesting window on the actions o f female entrepreneurs. There were proportionately more adult married women in the population, and in the gainfully employed population, in British Columbia than in the rest o f Canada for much of the twentieth century. And, women were more likely to be self-employed in the province than in the rest o f the country between 1901 and 1971.
These distinct facets o f women’s work made the province a good place to test the connections between women’s ages, their marital patterns, their life cycles, and their decisions to enter into self-employment. British Columbia’s striking gender imbalance for the first half of the twentieth century undoubtedly affected the proportion of women in the married population and in the labour force. That married women made up a greater share of the adult and the gainfully employed adult female population in the province than in the rest of Canada, in every decade under study, is perhaps not surprising in a province with few marriageable women and many eligible bachelors in the early decades of the twentieth century. But the higher incidence o f self-employment in the province is also connected to the high rates of marriage, and to the nature of British Columbia as a frontier, as is
elaborated in Chapter One.
Due to the overall lack of research into female self-employment in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada, it was necessary to undertake a broad overview of patterns o f women’s entrepreneurship over time using census data and then, where possible, to undertake a qualitative analysis of how trends over time were reflected in individual communities and lives. The period 1901 to 1971 was chosen due to the
considerations justify it. 1901, the dawn of a new century, was an apt place to begin as the records for pre-1900 British Columbia are scant, and the white female population in the province was particularly small.^ Moreover, in the pre-1901 period “white women’s experience was defined by limited opportunities for labour and financial dependence.”*
While such limitations still existed after 1901, women in the province addressed the limited opportunities for waged labour by turning to self-employment instead, and if depending financially on men was untenable, they actively sought out other options for financial survival. The economic and social possibilities available to women in the province, beyond simply arriving on “bride ships” to be married off to miners, were just beginning to be realized as the new century began.^ In addition, the Canadian Families Project’s database, a five percent sample of the entire 1901 census, was a useful tool with which to begin to analyse female self-employment. 1971 was an appropriate year to stop, in part because later census data is incompatible with earlier censuses. Other
methodological reasons for ending this study in 1971 are explained in more detail in the first chapter.
^ The extremely small population o f white women in colonial British Columbia prior to 1901 is dealt with by Adele Perry, On the Edge o f Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making o f British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2001). Her book provides an excellent analysis o f gender and of women’s “place” in colonial British Columbia.
* Perry, On the Edge o f Empire, 193.
® “Bride ships” contained young single women, “living freight.. .destined for the colonial and matrimonial market,” as the British Colonist described them upon their arrival in Victoria, British Columbia in September 1862. Their arrival is described in N. de Bertrand Lugrin, The Pioneer Women o f Vancouver
Island 1843-1866 (Victoria: Women’s Canadian Club, 1928), 146-149. For more on the story of the
women’s arrival on the first so-called bride ship, the Tynemouth, see also Jackie Lay, “To Columbia on the Tynemouth: The Emigration of Single Women and Girls in 1862,” Barbara Latham and Cathy Kess, eds., In Her Chvn Right: Selected Essays on Women’s History in B. C. (Victoria: Camosun College, 1980).
Businesswomen’s stories have not been told as part of the larger narrative of business history. Self-employed women were simultaneously like men and yet, separate
from the masculine world of business. If “gender matters,” it is not widely acknowledged in the field of business history, in which women are largely absent except as helpmeets to men. American historian Mary Yeager states in the introduction to the ambitious 1999 publication. Women in Business, that there is “no theory o f entrepreneurship, no theory of the firm, no theory of contracts or of marriage, no theory o f the family, no feminist theory that adequately explains the history o f women in business.” '® Similarly, gender and business historian Wendy Gamber suggests that “historians of women in business who venture forth in search o f interpretative contexts are apt to return empty-handed.” Female entrepreneurs “fall between a number of historiographical cracks” which may explain, according to Gamber, the dearth of scholars willing to combine the fields o f gender and business history."
That business and women’s history have been considered distinct, and even contradictory, subdisciplines of history has limited the number of scholars in the area. Business historians have continued to deal with men’s enterprises, failing to interrogate the role of gender in business, while gender historians have brought businesswomen into their own fields of study rather than becoming business historians. It has fallen largely to gender and women’s historians to explain and include the histories of businesswomen.
Yeager, “Introduction,” xxii. Yeager also wrote the first chapter (entitled “Will There Ever Be a Feminist Business History?”) o f her collection Women in Business. It is a useful survey o f some o f the main challenges of incorporating the “experiences o f women in business” into “the history o f business.' See Y eager, “Will There Ever Be a Feminist Business History,” 31.
Lucy Eldersveld Murphy published two early articles on female
entrepreneurship, in 1987 and 1991. They are devoted more to finding businesswomen in the American Midwest than to analysing gender in business, exemplifying the “women were there, too” approach. Even so, they mark a beginning point in the American
historiography o f female self-employment.'^ Eldersveld Murphy emphasizes the value of female worlds and separate spheres, describing female proprietors as “women on the edges of their sphere, with one foot in the male world of profit-seeking, but the other firmly planted in a world of tradition and female culture.”'^ This emphasis on women’s separate spheres has been critiqued in the field of women’s history generally. In 1988, Linda Kerber suggested that to “continue to use the language o f separate spheres is to deny the reciprocity between gender and society, and to impose a static model on dynamic relationships.”'"' She did, however, acknowledge that “our private spaces and our public spaces are still in many important senses gendered.”'^
Despite Eldersveld Murphy’s elaboration of female work worlds, the separate spheres paradigm is less applicable to studies of entrepreneurial women. As Peter Baskerville posited in 1993, “the notion of separate spheres may obscure rather than provide insights into the lives and behaviour of many enterprising women.”'^ The idea of a distinctive women’s culture has been useful in explaining the female work culture for
'■ See Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, “Her Own Boss: Businesswomen and Separate Spheres in the Midwest, 1850-1880,” Illinois Historical Journal 80 (Autumn 1987): 155-176; and Eldersveld Murphy, “Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, Journal o f Women's History h, 1 (Spring 1991):
65-89.
Murphy, “Business Ladies,” 65.
Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal o f American History 75, 1 (June 1988): 38.
Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” 39.
Peter Baskerville, ‘“ She Has Already Hinted At Board’: Enterprising Urban Women in British Columbia 1863-1896,'’’ Histoire sociale-Social History XXVI , 52 (November 1993): 208.
articulated, some types of female-owned businesses catered to a female elientele and were an important part o f “women’s culture,” ** entrepreneurship is not really about female worlds. And a more useful way of examining female entrepreneurs is to look at
relationships between men and women, rather than looking at women in isolation. This study posits that self-employed women should be viewed in relation to self-employed men, rather than as part of a female work culture.
Angel Kwolek-Folland’s Engendering Business: Men and Women in the
Corporate Office, 1870-1930 was published in 1994. While she writes about the ehanging
nature of work and “business” in eorporate Ameriea, the latter is loosely defined. Kwolek- Folland writes about the rise of offiee work in a more general sense, but the book was a sign of increasing interest in understanding gender in women’s working worlds and in white-collar work worlds in particular.*^ She also raises the issue o f separate spheres, noting that the entry of women into white-collar office work in the early 1900s called into
The notion of separate female spheres and of female work cultures has been used quite effectively to explain women’s experiences of work and the gendered division of labour. However, the importance of examining women’s work worlds in relation to men, and the importance of examining gender as a category o f analysis, is also an important part of the research on women at work that has developed since the mid-1980s. Nancy Grey Osterud points out that historians of ‘women’s culture’ presumed that “women turned to one another as an alternative to their relationships with men and that the qualities characterizing their relationships with one another were confined to their separate sphere.” But, she suggests, women also responded to the “gender system” by trying to “create greater mutuality in their relationships with men.” See Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds o f Community: The Lives o f Farm Women in
Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 9. Also see her Introduction,
entitled “No Separate Spheres.” Other authors have dealt with female work cultures while providing a more qualified analysis of the once-heralded concept of women’s separate spheres. See for example Patricia Cooper, Once A Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories,
1900-1919 (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1987) and in a Canadian context, Joy Parr, The Gender o f Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1990) and Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives o f Working Women in Small-Town
Ontario, 1920-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
Murphy, “Business Ladies,” 68.
See Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-
question “the ideal o f distinct public and private worlds for men and women.”^° This was also true of self-employed men and women, although she does not adequately distinguish between self-employed and wage-earning women in “business.”^'
Kwolek-Folland’s Incorporating Women: A History o f Women and Business in
the United States was published in 1998. She was reacting to, and reflecting a wider
interest in, the history o f businesswomen but again she defines “business” broadly, to include wage-earning and self-employed women. She includes the business experiences o f “diverse women in four areas related to the history of business,” including:
entrepreneurs, women as members of family businesses, the business aspects of
professionalization, and women’s roles as slaves, laborers, wage earners and managers.”^^ Kwolek-Folland places all these women under the heading “business,” something that does not seem warranted since there is much she might have said regarding entrepreneurs, her first area o f research.
Kwolek-Folland’s work is significant, however, because like Wendy Gamber, she attempts to “bring into a dialogue the two important fields of women’s and business h i s t o r y . H e r research reflects new directions in gender and business history. Those new directions were reinforced when the Business History Review published a speeial issue on gender and business that addressed the cross-disciplinary aspects o f studying
Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business, 10.
While Kwolek-Folland writes about office work, gender, and class, all relevant issues, she does not clearly separate self-employed from wage-earning women. She does, however, argue that business was “masculine” and that women’s entry into white-collar office work between 1870 and 1930 raised
questions about gender and work, particularly in middle-class professional working worlds. She provides important insights about business and professional women that have not been raised by labour or women’s historians, making her work a useful starting point for the study o f gender and self-employment.
She suggests that these four areas, or roles, have been “crucial to business history.” See Angel Kwolek- Folland, Incorporating Women: A History o f Women and Business in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 11.
businesswomen: it was an important recognition of a new way of examining women in business.
In this special issue, Gamber suggests that three “subdisciplines” of historical inquiry, business history, labour history, and women’s history, can provide insights into the history o f businesswomen. However, she points out that inherent contradictions between subdisciplines complicate the task of writing the history of women in business. This may be one reason why few scholars attempted it before the 1990s. But the interest in the area has also developed because it has gone hand in hand with the development of gender history. Joan Scott’s seminal 1986 article, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis” first opened the doors for historians to develop “gender as an analytic category.”^'* In her commentary on Kathy Peiss’s and Wendy Gamber’s articles in
Business History Review, Scott suggests that gender “is a useful category o f analysis in
business history, but also that using it is no easy m a t t e r . S h e reminds us that
“reconciling questions about women’s access, experience, and status with questions about firms, markets, and economies is not an easy task.”^^ The danger, Scott posits, lies in celebrating the empowerment of women and, furthermore, perpetuating their exclusion “by establishing a separate women’s business history.” At the same time, we must pay attention to the ways in which business worlds were organized by gender.
Kathy Peiss’s article in Business History Review reflects a slightly different aspect of gender and business. She addresses the role of gender in advertising, marketing.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics o f History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 41. The chapter cited here is titled “Gender: A Useful Category o f Historical Analysis” and was first published as an article in the American Historical Review 9 \, 5 (December 1986).
Joan W. Scott, “Comment: Conceptualizing Gender in American Business History,” Business History
Review 72, 2 (Summer 1998): 242.
Scott, “Comment,” 242. Scott, “Comment,” 248-249.
selling, and consumption. Examining the beauty industry in particular, Peiss investigates women’s strategies for selling goods to other women as well as women’s consumption of goods. This is another strand of business history, also tackled by Peiss in Hope in a Jar:
The Making o f Am erica’s Beauty Culture?^ Her research is part of a field of inquiry that
looks at consumer culture more than business ownership, although sometimes the two are combined. Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America, edited by Philip Scranton, provides a good sampling of the work in this field.^^
The ways in which production and consumption were gendered are relevant to any study o f women and business and Peiss in particular provides a perspective on how female entrepreneurs reacted to the market and positioned themselves, according to their gender, in certain kinds o f businesses. Female entrepreneurs in British Columbia operated flower shops, hair salons, and women’s clothing stores, businesses in which the
proprietors recognized that their potential as retailers depended in part on the gendered nature of consumption. Many businesswomen relied on a female clientele and opened businesses in fields that were associated with women; they understood their niche as female retailers and capitalized to some degree on their gender.
Women in Business, a three-volume collection edited by Mary Y eager, brings the
themes of gender and business together and draws on the American historiography of the
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making o f America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). See also Kathy Peiss, ‘“Vital Industry’ and Women’s Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth Century Business History,” Business History Review 72, 2 (Summer 1998): 219-241.
Philip Scranton, ed.. Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in M odem America (New York: Routledge, 2001). While Scranton’s collection includes studies on entrepreneurship (for example, Tiffany Melissa Gill’s article on the politics of African-American female entrepreneurship, and a case study o f cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder) it deals more with marketing, advertising and sales. Susan Porter Benson’s Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department
Stores, 1890-1940 provides an earlier example of the study o f consumerism that overlaps slightly with the
“business” o f retailing but the role of entrepreneurial women in mass consumerism is not her focus. See Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department
mid- to late 1990s. Yeager suggests that with “more women and men in academia alert to issues of gender and culture, the boundaries distinguishing the sub-fields o f history blurred.”^® By the 1990s historians of women had “begun to recover the histories of business buried in the interstices of the economy, in local neighbourhoods, in motels and hotels, in the beauty and funeral parlours, laundries, and boutiques,” and, she adds, the “engendering of business history had begun.”^’
Gamber is another of a handful o f mostly American scholars who have attempted to bridge the gap between business and gender history. In addition to articles that may be seen as “thoughts on the history o f business and the history of women,” as one is subtitled, she wrote The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930.^~ She has specifically examined female entrepreneurs from a gendered perspective, and as she elaborates in the introduction, “existing accounts [of the histories of
businesswomen].. .are at best cursory, at worst celebratory.. ..We need to know not only that women were ‘there, too,’ but also under what circumstances their businesses survived and flourished.”^^ Gamber’s work provides an excellent model for the study of female entrepreneurship in part because she suggests that a gendered analysis might help to “construct interpretative frameworks that encompass businesspeople o f both sexes, while revealing the ways in which gender shaped their respective experiences.”^'^ Many scholars have been unable “to ‘see’ women as the proprietors of business concerns, let alone place
^ Yeager, “Introduction,” xiii Yeager, “Introduction,” xiii 32
Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana; University o f Illinois Press, 1997). Her articles are also extremely useful for anyone interested in gender and entrepreneurship. See “A Gendered Enterprise,” mentioned above, as well as Gamber, “A Precarious Independence; Milliners and Dressmakers in Boston, 1860-1890,” Journu/ o f Women’s History 4, 1 (Spring 1992); 60-88; and Gamber, “Gendered Concerns; Thoughts on the History o f Business and the
Ylistory of'Worasn,” Business and Economic History 22), 1 (Fall 1994); 129-140.
Gamber, The Female Economy, 3-4. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 190.
them in any interpretative context.”^^ Few scholars have examined female
entrepreneurship in a broader context, producing, instead, biographies o f exceptional women. This is what Gamber cautions against and my work also moves away from highlighting women o f distinction. I have attempted, as Gamber proposes, to place
businesswomen in an interpretative context, examining them in relation to men, in relation to other women, and in relation to their families.
Gamber’s comments about the weaknesses of past histories of businesswomen apply equally to the history of Canadian businesswomen. Neither historians o f business nor women have researched them and when they are mentioned it is often as
“exceptional” actors either in the arena of business or in the arena of womanhood. In Canadian business history, women are given short shrift.
David Burley’s case study of self-employment in nineteenth-century Brantford, Ontario rarely mentions self-employed women, save for four pages in a chapter titled “Who Was Self-Employed?” Here, Burley proposes that self-employed women were an anomaly in a man’s world.^^ This fits with his overall thesis, which stresses the
connections between masculinity, independence, and self-employment; however, that self- employed women were an anomaly, or that they had different reasons for entering into self-employment than men did, should not disqualify them from further study. He concludes that for “widows and ‘old maids,’ self-employment was a means of survival with dignity. Yet, their independence was a matter o f form and appearance only.”^^
Gamber articulates, Stimson, the author of the phrase “school of manhood” and many other men of his day linked the characteristics of business success - ambition, assertiveness, competitiveness - to masculinity. But she also notes that scholars have followed in Stimson’s footsteps, using the phrase “unwittingly.” Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 191.
Burley, A Particular Condition in Life, 102. While the title of Burley’s book does not suggest that this is a study o f men only, his introduction makes it clear that he is really only discussing self-employed men.
Burley has perhaps understated the importance of female self-employment but he may be partially excused in that he has written a narrowly defined case study, unlike Michael Bliss who dismisses businesswomen almost completely in Northern Enterprise:
Five Centuries o f Canadian Business. The book jacket proclaims that Bliss surveys “the
entire history o f business in Canada” and tells the story o f “enterprising men and women willing to take incredible risks.”^* This is not the case as his attention to women is limited and therefore he does not actually survey the “entire” history.
Bliss notes that some wealthy male entrepreneurs who had hoped to pass down the family business “had no children or were dynastically crippled by having given birth to daughters.”^^ Bliss presumably meant that the wives of these entrepreneurs gave birth; regardless, he argues that when sons “were not there to .. .take the helm it was necessary to go outside the family.” Daughters were “not thought to have managerial potential or aspirations. What right-minded woman, almost certainly destined for marriage and motherhood, would think of business as a career, even if she did have a head for it?”*^® Bliss did not allow for the possibility that women could be mothers, wives and
businesswomen. In fact, marriage and motherhood did not impede most businesswomen and sometimes it was the presence of unreliable husbands or dependent children that led women to entrepreneurship.
Other Canadian business histories have also given little space to female entrepreneurship, although they have not dismissed businesswomen as confidently as Bliss. A Concise History o f Business in Canada by Graham Taylor and Peter Baskerville,
Michael Bliss, Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries o f Canadian Business (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987). See back jacket o f 1990 paperback edition.
Bliss, Northern Enterprise, 351. He is referring to family dynasties of the early 1900s, here. However, he also dismisses the existence of businesswomen in the 1960s. see Bliss, Northern Enterprise, 502. ^ Bliss, Northern Enterprise, 352.
published in 1994, is a broad study o f the connections between Canadian business
development and the evolution of capitalism. Like Bliss, Baskerville and Taylor cover an extensive period, from the 1600s to the 1990s. Their work focuses on larger themes rather than on micro-studies o f individual businesspeople. The individuals who get attention in the book are “heroic” men of business, those who acquired vast wealth and power: Sir Adam Beck, C.D. Howe and other elite white men of business are mentioned in passing, as are family dynasties led by men, such as the Crosby or McCain families.'*'
While Baskerville and Taylor stress the growth o f “big” business, they note the continued importance o f individual small business owners. However, it is primarily in the Epilogue that they address the importance of examining new “challenges” to Canadian business history, such as gender relations and the importance of female-run businesses.
David Monod’s Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture o f Mass Marketing
1890-1939 examines “the shopkeeper” in Canada and addresses the history of twentieth-
century small business owners.'*^ He addresses the patriarchal nature of small business and points out that women were largely “[bjarred from the brotherhood that underlay the professional ethos” o f the shopkeeper.'*^ Although he nicely highlights the gendered nature o f the shopkeeper’s world, and gives examples of female shopkeepers, he generally
examines gender from the perspective of male shopkeepers’ uneasiness with women retailers. Moreover, he frames his discussion of female shopkeepers in the language of folklore, arguing that male retailers’ cultural assumptions about women’s “place” in the world were used to refuse women retailers a place in their trade organizations. He does not
Graham Taylor and Peter Baskerville, A Concise History o f Business in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994).
See Introduction, David Monod, Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture o f Mass Marketing 1890-
1939 (Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 1996).
43
separate “folkloric images” of women’s role in retail from their real existence.
Consequently, his treatment of female shopkeepers under the heading o f ‘folklore’ negates their active participation in the business world.
John Benson’s research on small-scale entrepreneurs in Britain is useful in separating out small businesses from large-scale capitalism, and he defines the penny capitalist as a “working man or women who went into business on a small scale in the hope of profit (but with the possibility of loss) and made him (or her) self responsible for every facet of the enterprise.”'^^ This is a good term for understanding female
entrepreneurs, often penny capitalists, and Benson includes women in this definition, in his 1983 publication The Penny Capitalists: A Study o f Nineteenth-Century Working-Class
Entrepreneurs. Benson provides more detail on women’s experiences in Canada in Entrepreneurism in Canada: A History o f “Penny Capitalists. ” He suggests that women
were pushed into penny capitalism, running “food and accommodations” types of
businesses, usually due to extreme poverty brought on by the death or disappearance o f a spouse. Benson also argues that many small enterprises are not quantifiable and are missed by census data.'^
This is corroborated by Bettina Bradbury; in her examination o f working-class families in mid-nineteenth century Montreal, she points out that raising animals (often in small urban backyards), gardening, domestic production, and taking in boarders were all
^ Monod, Store Wars, 89-91. Monod also researches the place o f young wage-earning women in the feminization o f consumption; female wage earners increasingly sold goods to female shoppers, as retailing developed and grew. This is an interesting and useful examination o f gender’s role in consumer culture but again, Monod gives much more attention to women as shoppers and wage earners than as business owners. See Monod, Store Wars, 114-115.
John Benson, The Penny Capitalists: A Study o f Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Entrepreneurs (New Brunswick, N.J.; Rutgers University Press, 1983), 6.
John Benson, Entrepreneurism in Canada: A History o f "Penny Capitalists” (Lewiston, NY : E. Mellen Press, 1990), 77, 86.
methods o f “retaining an element of self-sufficiency” for working-class families/^ Even though they may not have been recognized as forms o f entrepreneurship in the census, such strategies were, Bradbury argues, forms of penny capitalism - although she does not refer to them as specifically entrepreneurial.
Labour historians have discussed female “penny capitalists” in many contexts, but there is some reluctance to label such working-class women as entrepreneurs. This is a matter of definition; while labour historians have researched boarding house keepers, and women who sold butter, milk and eggs, or who sewed in their homes, they have rarely been identified as entrepreneurial. When Canadian historians have acknowledged the existence of such entrepreneurial initiatives, they have examined them as non-wage contributions to family survival, as Bradbury has, or as temporary actions on the part of very poor women to cushion the blows of immediate financial crisis or seasonal
unemployment, as Benson explains. My work reeoneeptualizes the ways in which women’s endeavours can be understood. Removing them from the history of the family economy, and highlighting the ways in which their endeavours were entrepreneurial, affords women a legitimate place among the self-employed; they ought to be viewed as in and of the business world, rather than being seen as home workers or secondary earners.
One exception to the lack of historical inquiry in the field o f female entrepreneurship in Canada is Peter Baskerville’s research on gender and self-
employment. His 1993 article on “enterprising” urban women in British Columbia is an excellent starting point. His observation that few detailed studies existed o f self-employed
Bettina Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms o f Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861-91,” Ian McKay, ed., The Challenge o f Modernity: A Reader on Post-Confederation Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992), 68. For a more detailed treatment of non-wage survival in Montreal, see Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing
women and that historians tended to assume “that women did not pursue such activity, is still valid. Baskerville also addresses the relationships between self-employment, marriage, and bearing children and suggests that studying self-employed women provides a way of “uncovering, at all class levels, the hopes, fears and aspirations o f individuals within families.”'^^ His recognition o f the importance of these variables prompted, in part, my considerations of marital status, age, and family among self-employed women across a broader time period.
Baskerville has continued to research enterprising women in British Columbia and in Canada. “Women and Investment in Late-Nineteenth-Century Urban Canada: Victoria and Hamilton, 1880-1901,” published in 1999, also challenges the separate spheres paradigm as a way to understand women’s economic activities, particularly as “the owners and managers of material assets in their own names.”^^ The article addresses women’s investments as opposed to their actual entrepreneurship - obviously, not all women who owned property or invested money were self-employed - and it covers an earlier period than my work, but it provides a useful comparative study o f women’s economic behaviour in two Canadian cities, one in British Columbia and one in Ontario.^’
As this brief summary outlines, very few Canadian business historians are actively researching female entrepreneurship. Baskerville is the only historian writing specifically about women’s self-employment in a Canadian context and other than in his
''^Baskerville, “ ‘She Has Already Hinted At Board’,” 205. Baskerville, “ ‘She Has Already Hinted At Board’,” 226.
^ Peter Baskerville, “Women and Investment in Late-Nineteenth-Century Urban Canada: Victoria and Hamilton, 1880-1901,” Canadian Historical Review 80, 2 (June 1999): 191.
Baskerville has also written two usefiil as-yet unpublished papers: “Women, Credit and Consumption in Victoria, British Columbia, 1880-1901,” presented at the Women and Credit Conference, Fredericton, New Brunswick, September 1999; and “Gender and Self-Employment in Urban Canada, 1901,” presented at the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2002. See also Baskerville, “Familiar Strangers: Urban Families with Boarders, Canada, 1901,” Social Science History 25 (2001): 321-346.
ongoing research, when women are included in Canadian business or economic history it is as exceptional actors or as family members contributing to the family economy but not necessarily as independent proprietors/^ The scholars who are beginning to interrogate the intersection of gender and business history still form a small group and research published in this area has been almost entirely American/^ If the field has been small in the United States, it is almost nonexistent in Canadian historiography. The history of business has not included many women, while the history of women has not included many business owners.
Theoretical Considerations
Despite the lack of attention paid to female-operated businesses, we know that they existed and that women have been entrepreneurs for centuries. In the neoclassical economic paradigm, however, individuals are assumed to be men and there is, as Michèle Pujol has argued, a notable “silence” on gender relations. Neoclassical economic theory has “consistently denied the existence of social or economic power relations between classes, races or s e x e s . B u s i n e s s historians have also considered business to be
gender-A useful exception to this dismissal o f female entrepreneurs can be found in John Douglas Belshaw,
Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making o f the British Columbian Working Class (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). While the book is not about
entrepreneurs, and while it deals with nineteenth-century British Columbia, he includes examples of women running businesses in coal mining towns and credits them as entrepreneurs in their own right.
An exception to the dominance of American research and subject matter is published in a special forum, “Women and Business in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Europe,” Histoire
sociale/Social History XXXIV, 68 (November 2001). The papers explore issues similar to those raised by
North American gender and business historians, such as the declining usefiilness of the concept of “separate spheres,” and point to the need to consider gender relations in business history. The papers pay “attention to the ways in which gender structures shaped economic change rather than simply the reverse,” as Merry Wiesner-Hanks points out in her “Response” to the forum. See Wiesner-Hanks, “Response,” 374. However, the time period dealt with in this collection is much earlier than mine, or than that o f the burgeoning American literature.
Michèle A. Pujol, Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought (Aldershot, UK & Brookfield, U.S.A: Edward Elgar, 1992), 7.
neutral: the “only constancy in the meaning and usage o f the term ‘business’ has been an unexamined and unexplained gender bias’’ that has posed as gender neutrality/^
Portraying businesswomen as operating in a “separate sphere” o f women’s culture and celebrating their similarities with other women at the expense o f their similarities with other businesspeople can be just as dangerous as ignoring gender
altogether as an analytic tool. Generalizations can be hazardous, and “the experiences of female employers in two trades in a particular locale may not reflect the experiences of all.. .women entrepreneurs.”^^ Incorporating the history of women with the history of business, without simply adding in women and celebrating the fact that they were in the field at all, is part of the challenge of a gendered history of female entrepreneurship. Joan W. Scott argues that the history of businesswomen cannot rest on the “emancipatory impulses of women’s history.”^^ Yet, she also notes that while the study o f separate
spheres and the celebration of women-specific experiences of entrepreneurship may not be useful approaches, “some kind o f segregation did still exist in the world of business....
Specialization rested on sex-segregated markets.”^* Businesswomen were different in some ways from businessmen and the differences deserve exploration, but the interaction between men and women and concurrently, the interaction between gender and business, must be given consideration.
The great benefit to applying an understanding that business is not gender-neutral to the history of business is that it permits the historian to view female entrepreneurs as businesspeople and as women. Making allowances for gender does not necessitate a re
Yeager, “Introduction,” xvii.
Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 202. Scott, “Comment,” 242.
telling of the story o f men in business; rather, it allows us to bring women into the history o f business, focusing on them and accounting for the influence o f sex and gender.
Moreover, acknowledging that business is not gender-neutral means acknowledging that “business” is a malleable rather than fixed concept. Businesses, as Kenneth Lipartito argues, “are inevitably caught up in culture, and must rely on the language o f that culture to take action.”^^ Lipartito asserts that we need to know “how values crucial to business structures are constructed and how they operate.”^ All behaviours, even supposedly rigid and “unambiguous” rules of business, “are filtered through cultural lenses by all actors all the time.”®’ The implication for the history of gender in business is clear. Gender is another lens that we must apply to the world of business if we are to better understand what Lipartito defines as the culture of business; “business too is a text to be read,”®^ and gender is one of the tools that can be used to read it.
Acknowledging gender means acknowledging that women’s activities as entrepreneurs may or may not differ from men’s, but that both men and women are involved. As Scott has consistently argued, “gender is not fixed; it is always being worked on and always being produced.”®^ Therefore, business “is not reflecting or
appealing to stable beliefs in gender.. .rather it is producing these beliefs and relationships in contradictory and unstable ways.”®'’ The challenge is to understand the experiences of female business owners in relation to male business owners, dealing with the ways in which they were different without separating the two groups into entirely separate spheres.
Kenneth Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 33. ^ Lipartito, “Culture,” 17. Lipartito, “Culture,” 25. Lipartito, “Culture,” 36. Scott, “Comment,” 246. ^ Scott, “Comment,” 246.
Mary Yeager emphasizes this difficulty. While the literature on women in business has often suggested “the existence of distinct and separate female business cultures,
business historians need to go further to incorporate gender into the field o f business history. “Rather than examining women as lonely travelers following separate paths carved by historians o f women,” business historians are “poised to examine men and women as they interact in a changing economy.”^
For all these reasons, this study incorporates gender into the history o f business. I argue, as other Canadian gender historians have, that women’s lives are “no less rich or complex than men’s, and that women’s lives do not necessarily share the same rhythms.”^^ The study o f gender is not a study only of women’s experiences, but o f the interactions between men and women and of the ways in which “all social relations are gendered.”^* Certainly, the importance of gender history in particular lies in the way in which it can “take us beyond the study of the subject ‘ woman’.
While I acknowledge the importance of studying both men and women as gendered subjects and accept that they interact in the history o f business in all kinds of gendered ways, this study nonetheless privileges the history of women. As Nancy Grey Osterud argues, adopting gender as a theoretical framework does not mean abandoning a woman-centred approach.^® If gender history is in part to study relations between the sexes, it is also, as Gisela Bock maintains in her seminal essay on women’s history and gender history, to study relations within the sexes. In arguing for a gender-encompassing
Yeager, “Introduction,” xiv. ^ Yeager, “Introduction,” xv.
Franca lacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). See “Introduction,” xix.
lacovetta and Valverde, eds.. Gender Conflicts, xx. lacovetta and Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts, xviii. Osterud, The Bonds o f Community, 7.
approach rather than a gender-neutral approach, women’s history can be “gender history par excellence.”^' Women’s lives are as rich, complicated, and diverse as m en’s, and yet little has been written about the diverse experiences of businesswomen. It is possible and necessary to insert gender as a eategory of analysis into the history o f businesswomen and to privilege women’s stories over the already-established historiography of male
businessmen.
Gender as a category of historical analysis has become entwined with two additional analytical categories: class and race/ethnicity. As the authors o f the Canadian collection Gender Conflicts emphasize, “just as gender is equally, though distinctly, constitutive for men and women, so, too, class and race or ethnicity inform the lives of all women.
Class is, however, a difficult analytical category to apply to the history of businesswomen. Many female entrepreneurs ran very small businesses that lay at what Gamber refers to as the “murky boundaries of public and private, profit-seeking and philanthropic, wage labour and entrepreneurship, legitimate and illegitimate enterprise.”’^ Women-owned businesses have been hard to locate and difficult to define, particularly because they often differed from conventional businesses run by (and defined by) men. The histories o f female self-employment do not document large, female-owned businesses reaping profits in a male-dominated economic sphere, but extremely small operations run by women, often out of their own homes, to support their families and eke out a living. Most female entrepreneurs in British Columbia did not acquire wealth by running small
Gisela Bock, “Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects o f an International Debate,” Gender and
History 1, 1 (Spring 1989): 16.
^^lacovetta and Valverde, eds.. Gender Conflicts, xvi. Note: the introduction is written collectively by all of the authors whose essays are included in the book.
boarding houses, laundries, or hair salons. This complicates the use o f class as a category o f analysis and points to another of the historiographical cracks that hinders the study of businesswomen: labour history has not integrated the histories o f working women who happen to be self-employed into histories of working-class wage-earning women.
“Despite their proprietary status,” female proprietors often remained within the working class.^^
The female entrepreneurs in this study were for the most part petty proprietors.^^ They operated very small and financially vulnerable home-based businesses. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that many business owners, particularly those who were members of business and professional women’s clubs in British Columbia, were middle- class, educated women. Very few businesswomen actually left records o f their lives in print, and as in all other cases, educated middle- to upper-class women left more written records than did lower-class women. Indeed, that some women pursued “an option [self- employment] that suggested a somewhat individualistic outlook” and “wittingly or
unwittingly set themselves ‘above’ those they served” means that self-employed women are not easily categorized.
The problem with class, then, in the history of women in business is whether businesswomen are best viewed as “workers” or “capitalists.”’^ Business ownership, however small or financially precarious the business, separates the owner from the labourer and despite having much in common with their wage-earning counterparts, self- employed women have perhaps been justifiably left out of working-class history. The fact
Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 195.
Gamber uses this term, and it is appropriate since women’s businesses were much smaller than men’s businesses: see “A Gendered Enterprise,” 195. John Benson’s definition of petty capitalists would also suffice. See Benson, The Penny Capitalists, 6.
Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 196. Scott, “Comment,” 247.
that female business owners “defy easy categorization” in all kinds of ways, as Gamber states, should not lead us to abandon the question of their class status/^ But as Yeager points out, businesswomen’s lives tell us “more about hopes and expectations than spectacular achievements; more about the property-less than the property-blessed.. .more about petty market traders than rich merchants; more about service than
manufacturing.. .more about family strategies than managerial strategies.”^^ For all of these reasons, gender is the primary category of analysis in this study: where applicable, class is discussed as it pertains to certain groups o f businesswomen in British Columbia (see Chapters Three and Four which detail the experiences of the members of the Vancouver and Victoria Business and Professional Women’s Club).
Race and ethnicity as categories of historical analysis have also gone hand in hand with studies of gender. Certainly, I may be accused o f ignoring more nuanced aspects of race and ethnicity in the history of businesswomen. However, just as gender history is not only the study of women, the history of “race” is not only the study of women of colour. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues that race is a “metalanguage.” She suggests that it affects other social and power relations, such as gender, and that representations o f gender can be “coloured” by race. Race, she maintains, is all-
encompassing.^® My study focuses on Anglo-Canadian women who occupied “a position of race privilege.”*' That they were white women is not an indication that “race” was absent or that race cannot be used as an analytical category. The BPW club members did not interrogate their whiteness or their privilege: rather, they accepted it as fact. But they
^ Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 193. Yeager, “Introduction,” xxi.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Joan Wallach Scott, ed.. Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 184-186.
Catherine A. Cavanaugh and Randi R. Wame, eds.. Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women’s History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000). See Cavanaugh and W ame’s “Introduction,” 13.
were privileged, nonetheless, and their race and class privilege was entwined with gender. In researching the history of white women we may be tempted to bemoan, at times, their powerlessness as women but we must also address their power as white women.
O f course non-white, non-Anglo-Canadian women also operated businesses.*^ The 1901 census recorded specific examples in British Columbia of First Nations women who were enumerated as hunter/fisher/farmers and who declared their status as self- employed.** The 1931 census included, in its data on British Columbia, the numbers of stores operated by “persons of Chinese and Japanese Origins.” These figures illustrated that about 12.9 percent of all Japanese and Canadian storekeepers in the province in 1931 were female. When all storekeepers in British Columbia were considered, a slightly lower percentage - 12.3 percent - were female.*"* Non-white women also appear in other
sources, such as city directories: in 1918, Mrs. K. Ushijima operated a dry goods store and worked as a dressmaker in Vancouver.**
Robert McDonald notes that “immigrant” women contributed to the family economy in Vancouver, some through wage labour, such as Japanese women who worked in the canneries; others, such as Italian immigrant women, ran boarding houses. See Robert A. J. McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class, Status,
and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996), 216. McDonald also argues that
although Asians were “forced to the margins of Vancouver’s economy,” the Chinese in Vancouver became prominent in small business, providing service as grocers, launderers and restaurant and shop owners. However, he makes no reference to Asian women entrepreneurs. See McDonald, Making
Vancouver, 101.
See the Canadian Families Project’s five percent public-use sample o f the 1901 census. Note: one o f the difficulties with using the information on First Nations women who declared that they were self-employed is that they were very poorly enumerated. Census takers in 1901 did not reliably enumerate their ages, marital statuses, or even their names, making it harder to rely on the census to glean information about these self-employed women. Because they were not well-enumerated and the information on their employment status, their specific occupations, and their names, was sketchy, those that did appear in the five percent sample are not included among the total number of self-employed women taken from 1901 database.
Census o f Canada, 1931, Volume 11, Tables la and lb.
Wrigley’s British Columbia Directory, 1918 (Vancouver: Wrigley Directories Ltd, 1918). Other sources, such as the Okanagan Historical Society’s reports, provide stories o f Asian businesswomen, such as Sue Lee Ping Wong. Mrs. Wong moved to Kelowna in the 1930s. Her second husband died in 1960, leaving her with 11 children. Mrs. Wong supported her family by making and selling tofu. She sold it to individuals in the Chinese and Japanese community in Kelowna but she also sent shipments to a Chinese restaurant in Vernon. See Tun Wong, “Sue Lee Ping Wong,” Okanagan History: The Sixty-Third Report
